10 Lines from 10 Authors

The love of poetry is rare these days. It’s a lonely hobby, I’m afraid. Few are those who read it; fewer still are those who can read it properly, with enjoyment. I am willing to publicly disgrace myself (probably because it is 3 o’clock in the morning) by admitting that I have a mound of poetry books piled on my bathroom sink. Added together, you’d find a leaning tower of poetry stacked 3 feet high --no exaggeration--within arms length of the toilet. It has been like this for years, giving me plenty of time to rummage through thousands of poems. What follows are some nifty lines from poems I particularly enjoyed—though you will not find my favorite poems in this list. They come in no order and completely off the top of my head. As such the indentations, grammar, and all such details will be desperately off. My apologies. I wish only to convey those things I’ve enjoyed, without having to put in the effort normally demanded during daytime hours. I simply needed something interesting enough to keep me from being bored and boring enough to put me to sleep.

10. “Even now, I know that I have savored the hot taste of life/, Lifting green cups and gold at the great feast,/Just for a small and forgotten time/ I have had full in my eyes from off my girl/, The whitest pouring of eternal light,/ The heavy knife, as to a gala day.” – from the final stanza of Black Marigolds translated by E.P. Mathers

9. “lady I swear by all flowers” –e. e. cummings

8. “is it so Wind, is it so? All that you and I do know is that we saw fly and fix ‘mongst the flowers and reeds of Styx, yesterday, for a bed of tiger cubs, a great fly of Beelzebubs, the bee of hearts, which mortals name: Cupid, Fie, and Love for shame.”—From Song of the Stygian Naiads by Thomas (Lovelace?...Love something) Beddoes

7. “May she be granted beauty and yet not/ Beauty to make a stranger’s eye distraught,/ Or hers before a looking glass, for such,/ Being made beautiful overmuch,/ Consider beauty a sufficient end,/ Lose natural kindness and maybe/The heart revealing intimacy/ That chooses right, and never find a friend.”—From A Prayer For My Daughter by the ineffable William Butler Yeats

6. “or do the Modern dance. To you that’s destiny, to us it’s chance”—from The Truest Poetry is the Most Feigning by W.H. Auden

5. “so Eden sank to grief, so dawn goes down today. Nothing gold can stay” from Nothing Gold can stay by Robert Frost

4. “his effable, effin ineffable, singular inscrutable name”—from The Naming of Cats by T.S. Eliot

3. “for art is a form of catharsis, and love is a permanent flop, and work is the province of cattle, and rests for a clam in a shell, so I’m thinking of throwing the battle—would you kindly direct me to hell”—from Coda by Dorothy Parker

2. “And happy melodist, unwearied, Forever piping songs for ever new; More happy love! More happy, happy love! For ever warm and still to be enjoyed, For ever panting and forever young, All breathing human passion far above.” --From Ode on a Grecian Urn by the grandiloquent John Keats

1. “life is over there on the shelf”—by Emily Dickenson

4 Character Sketches without Characters or Sketches

This is what happens when you read too much Faulkner. You want the feeling that comes from the grit of the soliloquy without the work it takes to write a story.......blarg..........or...........blog?

1. “Do not tell a man who comes to you in need of aid that he must simply depend on grace, and think for one moment you have supplied him with countermeasures. You have not offered him advice; you have scarcely uttered a word. Grace only means we do not know the exact cause of our fortune. To tell a man he must depend on grace is to tell him he must affirm the consequent, or have Jesus Christ create a stone so heavy that all the powers incarnate cannot lift it. What you have done, what you have smuggled into this man’s mind is the idea that if he fixates on a turn of phrase concerning grace, it will grant him the power to abandon his fixation with cutting or pornography. You have taught him magic where machines are necessary for his deliverance. You have sent him sailing with Ulysses toward a home he does not have, saying words he does not mean, with an identity he cannot locate. You have, in effect, successfully diagnosed him the angel Lucifer only to immediately thereafter prescribe him the Devil.”

2. “Dreams and sophistication. Dreams and the color of the length of your favorite food. I remember once I dreamt about relations with my cousin; how I would quote ‘I have committed incest father’ where I spoke to no Father and it didn’t count as incest with my cousin. And I remember Freud how he would say that I had killed him. And then I thought how Jesus had usurped his Daddy, and we call Him Abba reverently, as in a contradiction, and the two together the Trinity, and the Holy Spirit tagging along sitting next to me and somewhere inside me during Sunday School.”

3. You will say my religion is a fantasy—the construct of a society in need of therapeutic measures to ensure its survival. And I will say, ‘so what if it is’? True weakness, your weakness, is the failure to dive into the illusion. It is only in the illusion that suffering is real. It is only in the illusion that happiness is real. Reduce me to a chemical, and I will forget the smell of both corpse and rose. And I will forget that I have forgotten the smell corpse and rose. When you expect the grace of the gods only to find yourself disappointed and yet still manage to slither back into hope like Satan into Eden then and only then may you give me a lesson on the meaning of strength. Acquiescence to the mundane is not strength. It is not even weakness. Weakness is a failure to reach the prize and acquiescence has no prize.

4. “You don’t mean ‘I don’t know.’ I don’t know never means I don’t know. It means I do not want to say or I think modesty is more advantageous or I am not going to put the effort into thinking about it because if I do I might find out something I don’t want to. “Seek and you will find.” You know the answer. You just don’t give a damn where it’s more important to give a damn because you have no love of others in your heart because you have no love internally. It’s the insides and inner inconsistency of a man that no filter can hide. The eyes always tell, or the mouth contradicting the eyes; our cheek muscles betray us when our words juggle. I may not catch it at the time or care, but I always remember later about that moment I felt something funny when you said it. And what am I doing when I feel funny all the time, and don’t say something right then to stop you? Why don’t I demand clarification there and then? Does it mean I don’t know; or does it mean that I know and don’t want to say or modesty is more advantageous or I am not going to put the effort into thinking about it because if I do I might find out something I don’t want to”?

On God and Grammar

Wayne Proudfoot (not to be confused with the Proudfeet hobbits in Tolkien’s Shire) makes the argument in Religious Experience that grammar constitutes our conception of God, specifically his attribute of ineffability. It is not uncommon among religious traditions to find the attribute of ineffability ascribed to deities or moral thingamabobs like, for example, the Tao. Anselm’s “God is that than which nothing greater can be thought” and Aquinas’ esse in his account of Divine Simplicity fall into this category. God used in this sense acts as what Proudfoot calls a ‘place-holder,’ since the very ineffability of “God-ness” fails to function as a pure referent.

Aquinas is particularly clear that we cannot actually talk about the essence of God. Our language is insufficient. At best we can only do one of two things: 1.) identify negative differentia and 2.) employ positive differentia, that is, analogous properties of what God might be like. Negative differentia are things which God is not. He is not a stone, a train, a story, a concept, an abstraction, etc. On the other hand, He is like some things. He is something like “Love,” something like our “Father,” something like “the Good.” Aquinas fears that to reduce God to anthropomorphic terms is to remove our sense of His otherness. (If my Aquinas is rusty, forgive me; it’s been 3 or so years.)

In other words, God as a symbol is not a referent to an actual object. There is no correspondence. Weird, right? Some religious theorists have taken issue with this characterization, saying that it is a form of intellectual laziness or simply bad logic. To refer to an object which cannot be referred to is nothing short of nonsense.

Proudfoot, however, makes an interesting play, positioning himself somewhere between Aquinas and these other religious theorist. In a sort of quasi-Wittgensteinian move, God in use has a function distinguishable from a referent and acquitted from being nonsensical. God’s very ineffability functions to produce a sense of otherness in His believers. How? Ineffability has a ritual and belief function determined by grammar. The grammatical backdrop inherent to theological paradigms provides the belief in God’s ineffability, and that ineffability functions as a catalyst for a belief in His mystery. In order to maintain a sense of the mysterious, theologians have included ineffability within their definition of God. Thus Aquinas says exactly what he means, and his characterization of God is not nonsensical.

Whether Proudfoot is right is beyond me. Much needs to be said about Proudfoot’s sneaky psychological evaluation of our theologian’s motives. Likewise, much needs to be said about whether grammar can produce the meaning of ineffability independent of religious experience, or whether, as another option, a priori categories of God might be determined by Calvin’s sensus divinitatis. Really, the question is whether the ineffability of God can be reduced to linguistic categories in the way Nietzsche construes the “leaf is the cause of leaf” problem. When does language constitute and create categories and when does it not? What I can say is that his approach is symptomatic of all things philosophy of language in the past century. Or to put it differently, his approach is nifty and I kinda like it.

Thoughts After Theory

Last Thursday night Dr. Dunning brought forth the rather ironic difficulty of theorizing about methods of theorizing. William James' typology of religious experience provoked the topic, leaving us questioning the legitimacy of typologizing itself. The catch word here is obviously 'legitimacy.' What can we possibly mean by it other than: to what degree does this method provide us with the means for knowing truth? Does typology provide us with truth? But even still, Dr. Dunning's question was more hermeneutical, i.e. how can we know that the interpretation of the presented data (that we typologize in order to find truth) is the right interpretation?

The trouble, he was pained to express, is that we cannot look at data qua data where it is not already interpreted. In phenomenological terms, objects (mental or not) are presented to us, and such as they are, they are already interpreted. Such is the problem of the hermeneutic circle: the transcendental subject 'perceiving' the immanent object (to use Husserl's terminology), and thereafter, the inability to 'step outside' to objectively view the immanent object without interpreting the interpretation. All immanent objects are necessarily and already interpreted, including the one perceived while stepping outside. To try to view the method of typologizing from the outside is really just another way of saying theorizing about theorizing where the neither theorizing possesses and objective point of view. Hence the circle.

To proceed down irony road, Dr. Dunning went on to produce a typology of modes for how people tend to interpret the data. There are, on his model, paradoxical thinkers and clear thinkers (and some others which i don't discuss here). Both James and I easily fit into the paradoxical category. Add nearly every poet since the beginning of time, a few of my favorites like Chesterton, Lewis, Tolkien, the majority of religious people, and a slew of Continental philosophers, and you'll have a picture of the paradoxical type. Life as it appears to us is a symphony of suggestions. The platitudes of 'clear' thinkers have little effect on us because we constantly feel that propositions set forth by the clear type are, well, either of little pragmatic consequence or boring.

I say this not to discount the clear thinkers. In the first place they are the last people on earth you want to make your enemy. They tend to be argumentative and, God help them, unconsciously sentimental. In the second place i have been too close to too many of them not to find it a credible modus operadni. They are unhesitatingly obsessed with the truth. Unfortunately, however, they also tend to think that their mode of obsession the only kind. Their criteria, of course, is that the truth, whatever it is, be clearly understood. Those who do not express or discover truth this way are not interested in it in the right kind of way. Many of them probably go so far as to say that if you do not express or discover truth this way, you do not express or discover it.

Thus you will find our analytic philosophers squabbling over the minutia of some minutia. It is a tactful and impressive exercise, really. Only someone with a certain temperament and mental constitution can do it. But it is tragically naive of those of them who think that they possess the modus operandi par excellence. I ask, "par excellence in virtue of what"? How can someone say their mode of interpreting the data is the better mode without invoking an objective principle--out of thin air-- for which mode is best ? Brake it down in layman's terms and you have, "i see the world this way and so should you."

I am beginning to think modes of interpretation have their corresponding psychological temperaments. It is very William James of me, i must confess, and i haven't yet worked out the details. The fear of consigning oneself to a false conclusion determines the insistence of our analytic types toward a modus operandi which fosters clarity. Given the true premises, we attain, however in-often, a certain answer. On the other hand hope as a temperamental disposition fits closer with the paradoxical type: truth, however incomplete or stretched, is attained en route, almost accidentally one might say. Additionally, it is almost always evolving. Of course, like every typology, there is not a one to one correspondence, not to mention it is an oversimplification. Any given human psyche is a bit more complex than that.

But what i like best about both approaches is their humility. Our clear types are O.K. with saying "i am only right about a very few number of things." Our paradoxical types are O.K. with saying "i am wrong about a great number of things."

Odysseus

A poem is never finished, it is only abandoned. For now, i abandon Odysseus to the backwaters of my consciousness only to return to him a year or so from now. I am not unaware of the audacity of taking on such a project. Tennyson's Ulysses is without question one of the greatest lyrical poems in the English language. I am not trying to copy Tennyson. Nor am i copying him in writing yet another poem whose title is the same: Tiresias. My project is much larger overall, and will thus inevitably consists of unoriginal parts. But to my knowledge, the whole is entirely original. It just so happened that Odysseus came easiest to me after i'd already written Diomedes, and Diomedes so happened to come easiest after writing Helen--a poem which is not, in the same sort of way, a recreation of Sarah Teasdale's masterpiece. Yet again, it just so happened that Helen came easiest after writing Menelaus, a character who, if my research is right, no one has written a poem about--save a small piece by Rupert Brooke. Thus some parts are original and some not. Both Tiresias and Priam are on their way, and Achilles has at least one stanza nearly complete. Still many more will are to be added to the saga. If i were to rank the four i have Helen remains the best piece, if not my Magnum Opus. Diomedes and Odysseus are about the same in ranking, though for different reasons, and Menelaus is last, though, ironically, i think one of his stanzas is the best i've ever written. In any event, i hope you enjoy, i know i did.

Odysseus

Perhaps I’ll cast my spell on you,

Dangle some luck or slow down time,

Or strike a chime, or throw the die,

Or better still I'll sing a rhyme.

Takes some talent to make believable

Make believe, but pretend is what i do.

So what if i tell a half truth or the whole,

It matters little what’s actually true.

For have we not known gods in better moods,

Tinkering our way back to the shipyards?

Say Muse, say we were to harmonize with a

Dripping of blood drops, not some cacophonous bards:

Who’d believe wondering and wandering were the same,

Or home is the cause of home ‘cause my mother said so?

That happiness is a kind of growing used to death,

And death caused by the hoping come off the alpenglow?

I wade the threshold between shoal

And crowd—where waters tease the sand.

Between pallor and pith, sea and seeing,

And what no dull mortal can understand.

To play at theologian with the gods;

Esteem them rightly but know them wrongly,

Aghast at the words and sacred songs,

At last to feel what’s been felt strongly.

That they are a sham,

And that so am I,

And that still we count the bodies with same

Poise, the same pace, with which we stack them high.

That my life and the sunrise circuit strive on ‘mongst,

The spangled and glittering cadavers deranged,

And this ditty is but the pause between the first

And second twitching of a leg half rearranged.

Farewell! And farewell again!

The battle’s won a retreat!

Now beauty’s out there, lost in twilight,

Among the councils of stars replete.

The current of this man concurrent

With fickle winds and fickle kings.

The reckless oceans and the wide azure,

Is quiet, is home, is the thing of things.

Religious and Non-Religious Sentiments

It's strange to be the only religious person in a religious theories class. This weeks reading of Rudolf Otto's "The Idea of the Holy" proved particularly odd. Studying atheist after atheist eventually turns into good fun for we Christians immersed in the laicized community. In a way we are used to trying to strap on the consciousness of people whose ideologies and temperaments are fundamentally different from our own. We are the minority, and as such must adapt to the academic milieu. I think if one succeeds at true charity, he ends up being able to defend Freud's position better than Freud did. On my definition, charity not only thinks what they have thought and thinks beyond them, it feels what they have felt. Aristotle says that the mature mind can coherently manipulate ideas which are not its own. I think the same principle holds within the psychological realm. A mature psychology can feel sentiments which are not its own. A psychology which empathizes with the sentiments associated with atheism has succeeded not only in understanding atheistic propositions but the allure of those propositions. Everything else follows suit. The intuitions of the atheist, the creative relationship between fact and theory begin to have meaning. The positive or negative impressions toward religion--any religion--begin to have valence. When someone religious says something overtly religious, a Christian well versed in the sentiments of atheism can feel the anti-sentiments pique.

Whether this model demonstrates just how shaky my view of identity is, is another question--and one that needs answering. For now i'm curious about the blatant sentimental ignorance demonstrated to me during this week's class. Otto is explicitly clear: "The reader is invited to direct his mind to a moment of deeply-felt religious experience, as little as possible qualified by other forms of consciousness. Whoever cannot do this, whoever knows no such moments in his experience, is requested to read no father; for it is not easy to discuss questions of religious psychology with one who can recollect the emotions of his adolescence, the discomforts of indigestion, or, say, social feelings, but cannot recall any intrinsically religious feeling. " Otto goes on to give his famous account of the numinous. To my knowledge there is no greater account of it. Otto at times is so penetratingly accurate concerning it that i wonder how often he must have felt it. Much could be added and subtracted from his account, modified and what not, but it is an empirical/psychological observation unlike any other i've encountered. (I will not go into the details.)

What struck me in class, however, was the antagonism, the misunderstanding, the pure naivety concerning the subject. I sat dumbfounded at the inability of both the professor's and student's inability to access the content of the numinous. Some suggested that Otto didn't really think that the numinous was qualitatively different from normal sentimental experience. Some suggested that Otto did actually think that non-religious people could access the content of the numinous--why else would he write about it. Some simply threw their hands up in bewilderment.

In truth, it was only with the third type of person that i had any sympathy. It echoes Wittgenstein's "Whereof one cannot speak one must be silent." They at least recognized a category with which they had no familiarity nor possible access. It was like listening to a group of people talk about the experience of reading poetry who had never had the experience of reading poetry. They spoke of iambic pentameter and prosody where only reading a line of Thomas Hardy does the experiential knowledge justice. One does not explain Samuel Barber's Adagio for String with musical notes. You cannot abstract signifiers out of sounds. The only option is to press the play button or go to the concert hall. (Otto by the way uses the feeling of the sublime as one of his arguments from analogy. The experience of the Mysterium Tremendum is analogous to the experience of the sublime.)

It reminds me of Lewis' essay Transposition where "lower" feelings cannot attain to "higher" emotions. The meaning gets muddled. I do not doubt that there are atheistic sentiments with which i am unfamiliar. Likewise with agnostic. But it does not seem to me that they are qualitatively different from any other normal emotional state. They are accessible conceptually without actually having experienced the emotion itself. Additionally, they are, for me, easily experienced. "It's not" says Quentin from William Faulkner's The Sound and the Furry, "It's not when you realize that nothing can help you--religion, pride, anything--it's when you realize that you don't need any aid." All too true given naturalism; all too akin to Nietzsche's passive nihilistic attitude. And all very accurate to the sentiments i've felt myself acting as a quasi-atheist.

But where the essence of a certain feeling lies in its very inexplicability, where only arguments from analogy suffice, where ideograms are substituted for abstractions, the atheist and agnostic--without religious experience--simply have nothing to say. Otto and I may assume the phenomenological possibility of inter-subjectivity to do it (and who doesn't assume the possibility of inter-subjectivity?), but Christian camaraderie, heck, Christian and Buddhist camaraderie often derives from mutual experience of the numinous object--whatever it may be. It is curious that here, in the realm of phenomenological experience, that the religious category of "Spirit" attains the superior conceptual status.

Sometimes a Man Just Needs to Write About What's on His Mind

Religious theorists like to answer questions surrounding the origins of religion. More often than not, it's in an non-falsifiable way. Freud makes the rather bold move of positing a pre-historical narrative. A group of sons killed their father, and, due to a sense of unconscious remorse, displaced that guilt of murder onto a Totem animal of some kind. The role of the father--protection-- thus became the occupation of the Totem. Sate the needs of the totem and the totem will sate the needs of the people. Later on within the evolution of this religious attitude, animism found the old Totem guilt re-displaced onto some kind of ghostly chimera. Mythological gods followed--slightly more abstract in nature--,and eventually the Immanent highly rationalized Yahweh (originally Jehovah) appears in the Semitic mythos. Add Christianity, Islam, and a tinge of Scholasticism, and what you have is a theologized, rationalization of a Deity figure, abstracted even beyond the capabilities of semantics (the negative differentia of Divine Simplicity). God is something so other He is not really something about which we can speak.

Nevertheless, for Freud, God still functions as a thing which cares for and protects, satisfies needs, and helps repress the original guilt, somehow sociologically (or physiologically?--Freud is never clear) latent within the collective mind. But even though religion or, later on, theodicy is therapeutic, they are incomplete therapy. In the way that a neurotic patient may hold some of his symptoms in abeyance via medicine, religions act as ephemeral cures. (Freud has a tendency to argue from the ontogenetic to phylogenetic analogy.) The disease remains, and only the only therapy is a recognition of, a naming of, a return and remembrance of the original event: the killing of the father. Once the causal event has meaning to the patient, healing follows via a proper ordering of the Id, Ego, and Superego. Once we, societies, know why and what we are repressing, we can begin to repress through the right modes viz. the scientific attitude. It's blatantly, and perhaps embarrassingly, akin to Plato's proper ordering of the desiderative, sentimental, and rational classifications of the soul found in The Republic. Health and happiness are caused through a rationalization of the internal man.

I could offer similar accounts from Weber, James, Jung, Eliade, Otto, Burkertt, Levi-Strauss etc. But my point for explicating Freud's account for the origin of religion is merely to demonstrate what sort of hoola-hoops thinkers are willing to go through to make sense of religious experience (at the personal level) and religious institutions (at the public level).

I find this need to construct a Weltanschauung a fascinating one. It fits, i think, into an impulsive category. It manifests itself as a need, a desire to be sated with "the thing which is the case." When we put the impulse into words, it comes out in conceptual form: but the event itself is not a concept. The phenomenon appears, furthermore, to be universal. I have never met nor heard of someone who does not desire to know--not necessarily even "the truth of truths", but any truth. If a disinterest in "what is the case" ever manifested itself in someone, i think i would be highly skeptical concerning the claim.

This impulse fits within the psychology of religion, or maybe more accurately, the psychology of Weltanschauung. We find ourselves with a need. From whence comes it? Christianity, of course, supplies a narrative to account for the impulse--not to mention that both Eliade and Otto (and even James) add their own religious models.

I don't know. Something about exploring these models feels--for me-- akin to the pleasure deriving from reading a poem or listening to a song. I wade in them like a man in an ocean, satisfied simply to explore the realms the current may take me. I realized upon reflection that this is the mode through which i construct my Weltanschauung. My methodology may appear a bit haphazard, and, i suspect, it is. Our current analytic tradition leaves us with the impression that schemas alone, logical validity, following premises to sound conclusions provide truths we may fearlessly adopt. Though in a sense i think this is right, i do not think it necessary to come vis-a-vis with truth. Too many people, normal people who don't blog about the Freudian fixations, construct worldviews on propositions they were told are true. Most people exist in a world argued from authority. To the degree that they adhere to truths, they do so because someone told them it was true. They arrive at truth by accident.

In the same sort of way, i have the impression that my methodological approach will place me in the position to acquire truth by accident. Coherency aside [or bracketed] and charity given, i think that to dabble is to know. More importantly it is to know a certain sort of thing. A long lost friend of mine once accused me of what he called "Tensionism." He was right then, and he is right now. The tendency to synthesize, to willingly suspend belief, the wish to eat a little bit of everything off of the buffet is really, in another sort of way, a construction of a Weltanschuanng. One object is to be full, the other object is to know "what is the case." I shall taste from the cornucopia of knowledge and be filled. The psychological dangers of such an approach take the form of dissonance and terror. The psychological advantages take the form of knowing a piece of truth in a way concurrent with the way someone else, fully engrossed in it, knows it completely. It is somehow, though not yet clear to me, related to Murdoch's definition of love--the extremely difficult realization that someone, other than oneself, is real. Additionally, it is related to James' account of hope standing in opposition to fear in "The Will To Believe." It is all a muddle, as one might expect from someone like myself. But i did not choose to see the world the way that i do; it feels, rather, like it chose me.